As recently as this week, I’ve been involved in conversations with customers about how we can help make their teams deliver more predictably.  How can they meet commitments on all levels of the organization, including project, program, and portfolio?

Well, it’s not easy.  There is no silver bullet that is going to allow you to align the organization overnight.  I do, however, have one recommendation:  Stop trying to maximize the utilization of your people.  I know some are going to find that hard to understand.  To maximize value throughput, you need to keep your people as busy as possible, right?  Didn’t Henry Ford do it that way, when he had cars coming off the assembly line at three-minute intervals?  Actually, no, he did not.  What he had and what you need is a balanced system.

Henry Ford did not have everyone working at 100% utilization.  If everyone worked at 100%, the result would have been congestion — bottlenecks within his (assembly) system and the production of excessive parts inventory.  Instead, one of the many things he did was focus on limiting lead times.  That’s the time something waits before an activity happens.  By understanding his system, he was able to have the right amount of people, working at the right pace, in the right sequence, in order to maximize flow (delivery through the system).

When trying to get your teams to delivery predictably at your organization, let’s look at this from a 100,000 foot view:

• Understand Current and Potential Capability and Capacity
• Understand the Delivery System and Establish Goals
• Balance Capacity and Capability with delivery throughput
• Monitor Performance

That is how you establish predictable outcomes.

No let’s look at this with some detail.

Understand Current and Potential Capability and Capacity

You’ve probably heard the analogy of a freeway being a value delivery system.  If not, let me draw the parallels.  On a freeway, we don’t care about utilization; we care about throughput. That is, we don’t care how many vehicles can fit onto the freeway. We care how quickly we get from point A to point B.  Measuring the capacity of the freeway is not going to directly help us. Measuring the throughput will.  For those who follow Lean Startup, these are referred to as vanity metrics and actionable metrics.

Actionable metrics can lead to informed decisions and subsequent action.  Example, I know how fast the vehicles travel on a given freeway, therefore I can plan accordingly to arrive on time.  Vanity metrics show that you’re measuring things, but they really aren’t helping you. You need to measure the right things.  By measuring the capacity of a freeway and then trying to fully utilize it would be foolish.  Strangely enough, I see organizations do that with their people all the time.  They try to keep them as busy as possible.

Understand the Delivery System and Establish Goals

We don’t build bigger freeways so they can hold more vehicles.  We build bigger freeways because we’re not smart enough to figure out how to limit the size or amount of vehicles on them at the same time.  The fewer or smaller the vehicles on the highway at the same time, the faster everyone moves along.  To increase throughput (speed) on a freeway, you need to increase the ratio of space utilized by a vehicle relative to the total space of the freeway.  If we could increase the (distance) buffers between the vehicles, we’d have fewer start and stops along our commutes. Once we hit higher utilization rates, things dramatically slow down until we have traffic jams.

Balance Capacity and Capability with delivery throughput

It’s the same thing with knowledge based systems!  Exceed a 70% utilization rate and you’ll begin to see dramatic performance decreases.

One thing that I have seen that is bringing it together is enabling teams to make their own commitments.  Once they have a sequenced queue of work and all the people necessary to complete that work, allow them to commit to, start, and then finish it.  You should begin to see the flow of value start to emerge.  Don’t pull people from the team to give them “busy” work.  Don’t push extra work on the team to keep them busy.

Monitor Performance

You can tell if your people are over-utilized by measuring the lead times.  If their work is properly sequenced, and they limit the size and volume of work they agree to do at any given time, the result should be minimal delays.  If you want to go faster, you may have to change the system.  Measure how long it takes to get something through your system.  Reflect on that.  Were there any dependencies on other people or resources that slowed you down?  Did you have your people over-utilized?  Was the work you committed to too big?  Look for an area of possible improvement, address it, and run work through your system again.  Did the lead time get shorter?

Going back to the commuting analogy, for those doing the driving, understand the conditions and know the optimal start time to begin your commute in order to avoid delays and arrive at your destination without breaking any laws.  For those asking for arrival commitments, respect what the driver tells you.  If you don’t, you’ll find people doing things like driving on the shoulder or illegally speeding in the express lane, just to arrive on time.  Sooner or later, there’s going to be an accident.

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I’ve been noodling on the phrase “Thinking Together”. Thinking Together is one aspect of the mindset that Product Owners need to embrace. I have been using this phrase with new Product Owners to explain why many Agile practices work. But each time I start to write about this simple idea, it gets complicated because I get into process steps and roles and responsibilities.

Yesterday, I returned to a big company with a pretty complex product portfolio where we had done quite a bit of work including starting up multiple Scrum teams. I recalled our first release planning with this group. There was a lot of uncertainty and even some anxiety about this “lightweight” approach.

They were missing their requirements and specification documentation. They were hesitant to assess the value and size of the features, concerned they might leave something out. I prepared a Release Planning agenda for them to follow. I also prepared a list of roles and responsibilities. And I had some one page cheat sheets on the activities for release planning. They needed some process rules initially to learn how to think together.

When I ran into a Product Owner from this big company months later, the changes they had made were obvious. He was facilitating release planning and was excited to walk me through it.

My friend the product owner brought me into the conference room where they were wrapping up their release planning. There were some product managers, the product owner, some tech leads, QA and even a project manager. They were taking a break chatting and smiling. There were some architectural sketches on the white board. There were four flip chart sheets with sticky notes representing epics and features. The flip chart sheets represented the work completed for the past release, the plan agreed to for the next release, and planning for the following release. They had one more sheet with parking lot items.

The product owner showed me the result of their Thinking Together. They had discussed the epics written on blue stickies and wrote all the features they might need on purple stickies and put them under the epic. Then they thought together some more and rated each feature with business value, complexity and sizing. They added some acceptance criteria and clarified assumptions as they went. They did this for several epics. Then they started adding features to the flip chart sheet representing the next several releases.

Now, they realized they would not get everything done that the product managers wanted. So they moved some lower value features to the parking lot and rearranged the features on the flip chart sheets until they agreed on a plan. By Thinking Together in planning the next couple releases, they pretty quickly learned together and gained a shared understanding of the work they would do for the next six months.

They had learned to Think Together to get the end result: a solid release plan.

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Hey everyone… I’m out in Vegas this week at the Scrum Gathering. Got invited to speak… which was really cool (thanks Daniel Gullo)… and did the most recent iteration of my Agile Program and Portfolio Management deck. Take a look and let me know what you think!

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LeadingAgile’s very own Jesse Fewell will be a speaker at tomorrow night’s PMI Atlanta Technology forum in Alpharetta, GA. Check out the following link for more information:

PMI Atlanta Technology Forum

Jesse will stick around to answer all of your questions about LeadingAgile. We hope to see you there!

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A lot of folks in the agile community feel like projects and project managers are a big part of the problem we have delivering software. My view is that projects are not really the problem… it’s projectized organizations that are the problem.

Projectized organizations form when we have people organized into functional silos and assign them as necessary to project work. The underlying assumption is that people are fungible resources and can be split indefinitely across projects to get work done.

Agile methods take a different approach. People are organized into cross-functional teams and focused on a product… or a set of features… or a component… or a set of services… within the larger production ecosystem.

Projects as a funding vehicle in most organizations are just fine. The shift in thinking is that projects have to be broken up and funneled through teams. Each team is responsible for a subset of the project deliverables with integration happening on regular intervals

I’d much rather integrate the work of many teams producing working tested features than try to integrate the activities of many individuals working within their own particular speciality. Done is easier to see and bottlenecks are easier to identify and resolve.

This is the #1 biggest problem we see with organizations trying to adopt agile. They do not have a pattern for organizing teams and managing project deliverables across teams. Until this gets sorted out… you are not likely to have much success using agile at any scale.

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